The new UK government doesn't like regulations, and it's not planning to …

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Europe, and the UK in particular, has long championed the view that its countries don't really need net neutrality regulations because they have more ISP competition (unlike those poor schlubs in the US). If consumers don't like an ISP's behavior, they can switch. With the new Tory/Lib Dem coalition government in power, the anti-regulatory mood has grown even stronger.

"This Government is no fan of regulation and we should only intervene when it is clearly necessary to deliver important benefits for consumers," said Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, in a speech today on net neutrality.

"At the heart of this debate," he added, "is the extent to which traffic should be managed on the Internet, and more specifically whether ISPs should ever have the right to favour one content provider over another, particularly for commercial reasons."

In Vaizey's view, yes, they should.

The ability to do paid prioritization in the UK is contingent on two principles: 1) ISPs can't block any legal content or service and 2) ISPs have to be transparent about the ways in which they are manipulating traffic.

Those two principles are Vaizey's pro-consumer measures; his third principle of Internet regulation is that the government should "support investment and innovation," which "means allowing flexibility in business models... This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service... The important thing is that ISPs and networks remain free to innovate. In doing so they may make mistakes and consumers should have the ability to make them pay for those mistakes."

Back inside the walled garden?

This is the sort of talk that the Open Rights Group was founded to resist. Sure enough, ORG director Jim Killock blasted Vaizey's approach to the Internet.

"Money and commercial interest can easily over-ride public interest if we do not assert it," he said today. His response is worth quoting at some length, as it's an excellent articulation of one point of view:

In other words, ISPs should be encouraged to find ways to charge for content delivery to help invest in their networks. We see the start of this with services like BT Vision, which uses BT’s networks deliver television programmes through a service that is only accessible to BT customers.

Such services work in stark contrast with delivering content through services like Netflix, iTunes or the current BBC iPlayer. Each of these services competes directly, and customers can easily choose between them in a fully competitive market.

It seems that regulators like [UK telecoms regulator] Ofcom and ministers of our governments do not see the future of the Internet as being best served through such competition, but wish to encourage “walled gardens” of ISP-provided services.

This might suit ISPs who want income, or governments who want easy answers to pay for network investment, but it will not serve customers of services well. It will undermine the competitive nature of the Internet, and provide opportunities for market abuse.

Walled gardens can easily work to further segment and control markets, and tip the balance against innovation, towards established copyright industry players. By doing so, they can limit the access of different voices to audiences, and limit the power of our freedom of speech. This is why this debate matters, and why Ed Vaizey is wrong to dismiss it.

The debate here echoes similar concerns in the US about "managed services," whereby ISPs would leave the "open Internet" alone but would be free to create separate, quality-controlled services of their own that run over the same connection.